Naipaul’s visit to the ruins of Vijayanagar, on the other hand, made him wonder about “… the intellectual depletion that must have come to India with the invasions and conquests of the last thousand years” (IWC, 17). In an outright rejection of India’s pastness and historicity he comments:

If Vijayanagar is now only its name and, as a kingdom, is so little remembered…, it isn’t only because it was completely wiped out, but also because I contributed to little; it was itself a reassertion of the past (IWC, 15).

In the ruins of Vijayanagar, Naipaul clarified that Hinduism “had already reached a dead end, and in some ways had decayed, as popular Hinduism so easily decays, into barbarism” (IWC, 16). Many Indians reject Naipaul for this charge on Hinduism. But it is not only Hinduism that Naipaul rejects. He is also well-known for his criticism of Islam and the Muslims. H calls the Indian Muslims converts and differentials them from the Arab Muslims. The charge is also leveled against him that he won the Nobel Prize for Muslim-bashing. But this is not again true, because if he is notorious for Muslim-bashing, he is equally so in his Hindu-bashing and the Nobel Prize should have been awarded to him much earlier when he wrote his first book- An Area of Darkness. As for example of Naipaul’s attitude to actual Hindu practices, he refused to take off his shoes at various temples including the Jagannath temple at Puri, pointing out that the temple floor was dirtier than his shoes. Our rejection of Naipaul, therefore, “…arises not so much from his ancestral Indian roots, …rather more from our sense that though he may indeed be some kind of an Indian ethnically speaking, he is politically speaking the wrong kind of Indian” (Trivedi, 55).

Such an observation not only unnaturally distances Naipaul from India, as it makes a sweepingly harsh judgment. His blistering critique of India at once connects him to the tradition of India-baiters right from Maccaulay to Kipling, Forster and Nirad Chaudharu. In fact, Nirad and Naipaul found so similar that one might as well read Nirad’s The Autobiograpy of an Unknown Indian as the biography of an unknown Naipaul’s dark version of India as the sophisticated post-Raj version of “kitsh gibbonism of Nirad Chaudhari” (Qtd. In Kumar, 66). In addition, Naipaul does not talk about Indian art, music, drama, film etc. and keeps his studies silence on them so naturally the critique on India remains incomplete so far. What was lacking in the first book, however, was made up for in the Wounded Civilization. In his first book on India, Naipaul was silent on current events of the country. In the second book, he takes up detailed discussion of India’s political scenario and profiles some politicians critically. He is too critical about Mahatma Gandhi and Vinobha Bhave on one hand, and criticizes Jai Prakash Narayan on the other hand. Towards Mrs. Indira Gandhi, he Is very attracted and admires her for imposing emergency on the country. Similarly, he is also critical about certain socio-political movements in India, especially the Naxalite movement calling it a dangerous movement that borrows somebody else’s idea of revolution. In one sense, however, we may say that India: A Wounded Civilization  is Naipaul’s attempt at understanding India and its condition. This attempt becomes more ambitious and more comprehensive in his third book on India. 

Article Posted By : ceorahulgonsalves  On July 11, 2012lView All Articles

CEO and Founder of naashtapaani.com with a keen interest in HR and Marketing.

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